Brochs are one of the ultimate expressions of regional
diversity in the British Iron Age, a geographically restricted, monumental
and complex variant of the roundhouse. They are the best-preserved Iron
Age dwellings in Britain if not Europe, often requiring the visitor
to duck to avoid the lintel as they enter the building, and yet too
often they have been sidelined as local curiosities in wider narratives
of the period. This trend has been bucked in recent years in the specialist
literature, with more theoretically-informed interpretations; here Armit
sets out to place broch studies before a wider audience.

The seven chapters move logically through the subject,
synthesising a tremendous amount of the specialist and often obscure
literature in readily-digestible form. After a useful consideration
of the history of broch studies, Armit looks at brochs within wider
roundhouse traditions, describing the key developments of the 1970s
and 1980s when the local lineage of the brochs was first demonstrated
at Bu on Orkney with its massive-walled early Iron Age roundhouse, followed
by the first modern disentangling of the full sequence from roundhouse
to broch tower at Howe, also on Orkney. This introduces something of
the diversity of structures subsumed under the ‘broch’ category.
Chapter 3 looks in detail at the most dramatic manifestations of the
tradition, the ‘broch towers’ which form the main popular
image of the broch, dominating the surrounding landscape. Here their
various architectural features are described and the various theories
put forward with their pros and cons assessed. There is a valuable presentation
of the architect John Hope’s hitherto-unpublished thoughts on
how the sites may have worked in architectural terms, a useful basis
for further argument.

Armit is steadfastly even-handed in the assessment
of debates which have often proved vitriolic, such as the nature of
roofs, the significance of ground-galleried versus solid-based walls,
and the typology of brochs; having been central to many of the discussions
in the 1980s and 1990s, this hindsight is valuable in showing where
some progress has been made (as in the consensus now that brochs must
have been roofed) and where the evidence can still be explained in different
ways; for instance, the ground-galleried versus solid-based argument
can as easily be regional variants as chronologically-significant forms.
The debates are rarely exhausted, but this work provides a springboard
into them for those who have not followed the twists and turns of the
detailed argument.

Chapter four considers the lifestyles of the people
and how they used the landscape around them. Specialists will doubtless
consider that the plant / animal / find evidence (delete as appropriate)
could have been treated with the same detail as the architecture, but
Armit summarises most of the key debates (such as the debated topic
of dairying, p86) with further references to guide the enthusiast. One
area where he slips slightly is in downplaying the evidence for contacts
within the Atlantic region (p92). Aside for the shared elements of broch
architecture itself, there is evidence of social interaction not just
in exotic goods (a subject requiring renewed study, as there is more
evidence of local- and regional-scale movements than has been realised)
but also in artefact styles shared across the Atlantic and beyond. Here
perhaps we see echoes of the discipline’s history: the heated
debates between diffusionists and local evolutionists over broch origins
have left a scar which has made the study of contacts an unfavoured
topic, and one now requiring more theoretically-nuanced attention.

In the wider picture Armit makes a strong case that
the typical broch was not an elite residence but the ubiquitous local
farmhouse for those who owned the land, another topic which has seen
much recent debate; it seems any hierarchies in this area were relatively
shallow, with a strong degree of autonomy for the individual households.
The exception to this, the broch villages which developed in Orkney
and Caithness, are considered in chapter five. These clusters of smaller
settlement units enclosed under the shadow of the broch tower appear
to form nucleated hierarchical settlements, but his summary of the very
varied possible interpretations of this (pp97-9, 117-8) emphasises how
far we have to go in understanding them.

Few aspects of broch studies have been uncontroversial,
and chapter six considers another thorny topic, the appearance of broch-type
structures south of the Highland Line. Recently published excavations
have allowed a more nuanced understanding of the phenomenon, and it
is clear that a direct correlation with the waves of Roman advance and
withdrawal is now unsustainable. A connection with Rome is indeed likely,
given the wealth of Roman finds from many of the sites, but it seems
better to see this, following Lesley Macinnes (1984), as reflecting
various social strategies of an existing or emergent elite, drawing
on artefactual and architectural exotica to create or sustain their
control. Here the recent work at the classic southern broch of Edinshall
has been a valuable case study, suggesting in this instance that the
power and wealth which allowed the building of the broch arose not from
connections with Rome but control of the local copper supplies.

The final chapter looks beyond the brochs, at the
architectural forms which succeeded them and the implications of this.
In particular Armit considers the development of wheelhouses, another
roundhouse variant, less monumental externally but with dramatically-disposed
internal space. Finally he considers the reuse of broch sites and their
continuing role in the landscape.

The book is well-written, with Armit offering both
succinct site summaries and some powerful evocations of broch life:
the conjuring of the past from the bare foundations of the Gurness broch
village, for instance (pp105-6), makes you look at the site anew. The
production is good from a publisher who is often rather variable, and
typographic errors are few (with BC for AD on p124 perhaps the only
one likely to mislead); the annotated bibliography at the end provides
the reader with no excuse for continuing ignorance of the literature,
a resource again often lacking in Tempus publications. There is also
a repeated concern to engage in the wider implications of the topic,
with attempts to look beyond the impressive stonework to the social
motives. Topics such as the adoption of roundhouses (a late event here
in British terms, appearing only at the start of the Iron Age), the
nature of landholding and the impact of Rome are touched on. Here Armit
is often not just summarising but developing the debate, and it is to
be hoped that these flashes of ideas will be given fuller treatment
than the constraints of a synthetic book allow, before they acquire
the status of hallowed factoids for undergraduate essays.

The one area which feels weak is the ending. The reader
is left rather tamely with a description of post-medieval reuse of brochs.
Where is the excitement, to leave them thirsting for more? Where are
the avenues for further work? Broch studies are alive and kicking, not
least in the studies emerging from the Old Scatness project on Shetland
(e.g. Dockrill 2002; Bond 2002), while the first volume of Euan Mackie’s
broch corpus (Mackie 2002, too late for Armit’s bibliography)
starts to provide the raw data for much further work. Yet although Armit
discusses this in the body of the text, he lacks the final few paragraphs
to draw it all together, point to key topics and send the reader forth
enthused for the debate to come. It is the only serious concern with
this valuable book: Armit successfully makes brochs interesting for
the wider audience, not a purely Scottish topic but one which no-one
with an interest in the British Iron Age dare now see as peripheral
or irrelevant.